CONFRONT THE ISSUE
FDR AND THE
HOLOCAUST
1942-1945
America’s response to the Holocaust has become the subject of intense historical interest in recent decades.
Historians debate why FDR and other American decision-makers did not do more to admit Jewish refugees and
undertake policies—including bombing rail lines to Auschwitz or Auschwitz itself—that might have saved lives.
In 1942, as reports of Hitler’s Final Solution began to reach the Allies, it was difficult for the public and many
government officials to grasp the extent and significance of the Nazis’ systematic, mechanized killing. In a
December 13, 1942 radio broadcast listened to by millions, popular newsman Edward R. Murrow spoke of “a
horror beyond what imagination can grasp...there are no longer ‘concentration camps’—we must speak now
only of ‘extermination camps.’”
On December 17, 1942, the United States joined ten other Allied governments in issuing a solemn public
declaration condemning Nazi Germany’s “bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination” of the Jews. The
American Congress and the British Parliament stood in silence on that date to mourn what was happening to
the Jews and pray for the strength needed to defeat the Nazis.
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select documents
from the FDR Library
and excerpts from
the historical debate.
Roosevelt believed that the surest way to stop the killing of innocent civilians was to defeat Hitler’s Germany as
quickly and decisively as possible. Critics say FDR’s “win the war” approach did not address the possibility that
significant numbers of Jews might have been rescued. One important debate involves the potential bombing
of rail lines into Auschwitz, or Auschwitz itself. The camp was within range of Allied bombers, but American
military leaders were unresponsive, in part because they maintained it would divert resources needed to
prosecute the war.
In January 1944, after learning from Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. that the State Department
was obstructing rescue efforts, Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board to coordinate governmental and
private efforts to rescue those who might still be saved. The Board is credited with saving at least 200,000 Jews.
Critics argue that if FDR had acted earlier, and more boldly, even more lives could have been saved.
CONFRONT THE ISSUE
FDR AND THE
HOLOCAUST
1942-1945
Rabbi Stephen Wise’s Letter to FDR and Pages from His Memo on Nazi
Atrocities, December 2-8, 1942
At the infamous Wannsee Conference held in January 1942, a group of Nazi
bureaucrats met to organize “a final solution” to Europe’s so-called Jewish
problem. As the plan for systematic, mechanized killing was implemented in the
following months, news reports began to publicize the scope of Nazi atrocities
against Jews. Rabbi Stephen Wise and other Jewish leaders collected detailed
reports from their sources abroad. In this December 2, 1942 letter, Wise requests
a meeting with Roosevelt to convey his group’s findings. At an Oval Office
meeting on December 8, they presented FDR with a memo summarizing their
information. Selected pages of the memo are also provided here. Wise appealed
to Roosevelt to bring attention to the horror and to do what he could to stop
it. FDR was sympathetic, but noncommittal. He confirmed that Wise’s report
was consistent with information he had received from other sources. But he
maintained that the Allies were fighting for the rights of all people, and could
not elevate one group over another.
Official File 76c: Church Matters-Jewish, 1942
CONFRONT THE ISSUE
FDR AND THE
HOLOCAUST
1942-1945
Report by the Office of Strategic Services on Germany’s Extermination of
the Jews, March 17, 1943
Throughout the war, President Roosevelt received information about the Nazi
death machine from a variety of sources, including the State Department,
Treasury Department, his own personal network of informants, private relief and
Jewish organizations, and the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor of the
CIA). This OSS report describing a further escalation of Nazi violence against
Jews was received in the White House Map Room on March 17, 1943.
Map Room Papers; MR 203(12); Sec. 1; OSS Numbered Bulletins, March-May 1943; Box 72
CONFRONT THE ISSUE
FDR AND THE
HOLOCAUST
1942-1945
Draft of Eleanor Roosevelt’s “My Day” Column on a Postwar Jewish Homeland
August 13, 1943
Reports of the horrors inflicted on Europe’s Jews continued to reach Allied
governments and appear in the American media throughout 1943. At the
same time, Roosevelt and Churchill were engaged in sometimes contentious
discussions over Palestine and its potential for a postwar Jewish homeland, which
Roosevelt supported. In her August 13, 1943 “My Day” column—a draft of which
is seen here—Eleanor Roosevelt discussed the brutality faced by Europe’s Jews
and the difficulty of finding a new home for them. “I do not know what we
can do to save the Jews of Europe and to find them homes,” Eleanor Roosevelt
laments, “but I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur
without exerting ourselves to correct them.”
Eleanor Roosevelt Papers; Speech and Article File: My Day Drafts, August 1943; Box 1435
CONFRONT THE ISSUE
FDR AND THE
HOLOCAUST
1942-1945
Memo of White House Meeting on State Department Inaction and
Obstruction, January 16, 1944
A seminal moment in the Roosevelt Administration’s response to the Holocaust
was a January 16, 1944 White House meeting involving the President, Treasury
Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Treasury’s general counsel Randolph Paul, and
Morgenthau’s assistant John W. Pehle. At this meeting, Morgenthau presented
a lengthy and blunt “Personal Report” on what Morgenthau and other Treasury
officials believed to be the State Department’s acquiescence in Germany’s mass
murder of Jews. The startling evidence of State Department incompetence, delay,
and even obstruction of a variety of rescue efforts convinced Roosevelt of the
need to establish an independent commission to coordinate rescue and relief
efforts. This memo of the meeting was written by John Pehle. Pehle became the
first Director of the War Refugee Board, which FDR established by Executive
order several days later.
Diaries of Henry Morgenthau, Jr.; Book 694; Pages 190-192
CONFRONT THE ISSUE
FDR AND THE
HOLOCAUST
1942-1945
Draft Presidential Statement and Executive Order Establishing the War
Refugee Board, January 22, 1944
President Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board by Executive order on
January 22, 1944. Composed of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury,
and the Secretary of War, the Board reported directly to the President. In this draft
presidential statement, and the Executive order that follows, the Board is charged
with taking all measures possible to rescue victims of enemy oppression and to
take action “at once to forestall the plan of the Nazis to exterminate all the Jews
and other persecuted minorities in Europe.” It was authorized to coordinate with
other departments of the U.S. government, Allied and neutral governments, and
independent organizations to develop and implement rescue plans and establish
places of safe haven. FDR’s Executive order expressly ordered the State, Treasury,
and War Departments to execute the plans developed by the Board and to aid in
rescue efforts.
Official File 5477: War Refugee Board, 1944-1945
CONFRONT THE ISSUE
FDR AND THE
HOLOCAUST
1942-1945
Statement by the President Regarding War Atrocities
March 24, 1944
As the number and ferocity of wartime atrocities increased, President Roosevelt
believed it necessary to issue a forceful statement condemning Nazi and Japanese
brutalities and specifically mentioning the mass murder of European Jews. In this
statement—drafted by the War Refugee Board and revised by the State and War
Departments—Roosevelt makes it clear that Allied victory is inevitable and that those
responsible for crimes against humanity will be brought to justice. The statement
was issued on March 24, 1944. To insure its penetration into German-controlled
territories, it was printed in many languages and dropped as leaflets. The British
Broadcasting Company (BBC) relayed the translated statement to enemy and
occupied countries. This particular draft of the statement was filed in the White
House files on April 3, 1944.
President’s Personal File 1-F: Press Releases-Drafts, 1944
CONFRONT THE ISSUE
FDR AND THE
HOLOCAUST
1942-1945
Exchange of Letters on Bombing Rail Lines to Auschwitz
June 24-July 4, 1944
One of the most controversial aspects of the Roosevelt Administration’s reaction
to the Holocaust is the decision not to bomb rail lines used to transport prisoners
to Auschwitz. As early as March 1943, requests to bomb these lines had reached
various government officials from Jewish sources both at home and abroad. The
Administration was reluctant to take such action, though, fearing the raids might
kill the prisoners they were meant to save and divert military resources needed
elsewhere to defeat Germany. In 1944, War Refugee Board Director John W. Pehle
made several direct appeals to the War Department to bomb various death camps
and rail lines. In this June 29 letter, he requests that the rail lines running from
Hungary to the Polish death camp at Auschwitz be destroyed. Assistant Secretary
of War John J. McCloy’s response on July 4, 1944 states the military’s position
with regard to such suggestions and reflects Roosevelt’s belief that the surest way
to end the killing was to defeat Nazi Germany as quickly as possible.
War Refugee Board Records; Measures Directed at Halting Persecutions; Hungary, Vol. 5; Box 42
CONFRONT THE ISSUE
FDR AND THE
HOLOCAUST
1942-1945
Exchange of Letters between Herbert Luft and the War Refugee Board
August 19-September 29, 1944
When Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board on January 22, 1944, he declared
it to be the policy of the United States government “to take all measures within its
power to rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger and
otherwise to afford such victims all possible relief and assistance consistent with
the successful prosecution of the war.” This exchange of letters between Herbert
Luft of Los Angeles and War Refugee Board Director John W. Pehle reflects
the type of personal appeals that were made to the Board as well as the Board’s
massive efforts to help Jews suffering in enemy territory.
War Refugee Board Records; Requests for Specific Aid; File: Luft, Herbert; Box 28
CONFRONT THE ISSUE
FDR AND THE
HOLOCAUST
1942-1945
Selected Pages of the Vrba-Wetzler Report on Auschwitz-Birkenau
April-October 1944
On April 7, 1944, two Slovakian Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz made a daring escape
from the death camp. Having heard German guards talk about the imminent arrival
of Hungarian Jews, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler sought to warn the world of the
gas chambers and crematoria at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in an effort to halt
the Hungarian deportations. Upon reaching safety, the two men dictated a detailed
report about the camp, including how it functioned, an estimated number of deaths,
and drawings of the grounds and gas chambers. The Vrba-Wetzler report was typed up
by the Slovakian Jewish Council, but summaries of the report did not begin reaching
outside Jewish organizations and Allied governments until June. A full copy of the
report—selected pages of which are seen here—did not arrive at the War Refugee Board
until October 1944. The report prompted Board Director John Pehle to appeal once
again to the War Department to bomb the rail lines and the camp. But, once again,
Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy rejected the proposal, arguing that Allied
bombers would have to fly unescorted over thousands of miles of enemy territory and
that the mission would divert resources from military targets. By this time, hundreds
of thousands of Hungarian Jews had died at Auschwitz.
War Refugee Board Records; General Correspondence; German Extermination Camps; Box 7
CONFRONT THE ISSUE
FDR AND THE
HOLOCAUST
1942-1945
War Refugee Board Report on Number of Persons Rescued
February 19, 1945
In February 1945, after its first full year in operation, the War Refugee Board
sought to quantify it success in rescuing Jews. As can be seen in this report, the
Board facilitated the rescue and relocation of over 126,000 Jews to neutral or
Allied nations. This figure does not include an additional 75,000 Jews that were
not relocated but that were saved as a result of other Board efforts. But these
successes by the Roosevelt Administration in rescuing Jews between 1944 and
1945 pale in comparison to the tragic figures on the pages that follow that estimate
the total number of Jews killed and the overall reduction of Jewish populations
throughout Europe. These figures also raise the question of how many more lives
could have been saved had the War Refugee Board been established earlier.
War Refugee Board; General Correspondence: War Refugee Board, Vol. 3; Box 33
CONFRONT THE ISSUE
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
HOLOCAUST
Roosevelt lived during the war and the Holocaust, but he inhabited a pre-Holocaust world. Few of his
contemporaries recognized the political or moral significance of the events we now scrutinize carefully.
Ironically, our work suggests that American Jews of Roosevelt’s own time came close to a balanced
and accurate assessment of their president. Although most American Jews—both leaders and ordinary
folk—revered the president, they were not blind to the limitations or the constraints under which he
operated. Even Jewish advocates close to FDR recognized that he often failed to turn humanitarian
principles into action to benefit Jewish victims of Nazism, especially during his first term and the
period from the outbreak of World War II through the formation of the War Refugee Board. They
understood, however, that he was the first president to intervene part of the time on behalf of their
oppressed brethren abroad—and during world crises of unparalleled scope and gravity. They also knew
that without his leadership, the resistance to Nazi aggression would have been much weaker than it
was, perhaps even fatally so. For Jews, he posed a far better choice than the political opponents of
his era, not just in his response to Jewish peril, but also in his domestic and foreign policies, and his
integration of Jews into American government.
FDR AND THE
1942-1945
Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews (Belknap Press, 2013), 328-329
CONFRONT THE ISSUE
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
HOLOCAUST
America’s response to the Holocaust was the result of action and inaction on the part of many people.
In the forefront was Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose steps to aid Europe’s Jews were very limited. If he
had wanted to, he could have aroused substantial public backing for a vital rescue effort by speaking
out on the issue. If nothing else, a few forceful statements by the President would have brought the
extermination news out of obscurity and into the headlines. But he had little to say about the problem
and gave no priority at all to rescue….It appears that Roosevelt’s overall response to the Holocaust was
deeply affected by political expediency. Most Jews supported him unwaveringly, so an active rescue
policy offered little political advantage. A pro-Jewish stance, however, could lose votes. American
Jewry’s great loyalty to the President thus weakened the leverage it might have exerted on him to save
European Jews. The main justification for Roosevelt’s conduct in the face of the Holocaust is that he
was absorbed in waging a global war. He lived in a maelstrom of overpowering events that gripped his
attention, to the exclusion of most other matters….Roosevelt’s personal feelings about the Holocaust
cannot be determined. He seldom committed his inner thoughts to paper….There are indications that
he was concerned about Jewish problems. But he gave little attention to them, did not keep informed
about them, and instructed his staff to divert Jewish questions to the State Department….In the
end, the era’s most prominent symbol of humanitarianism turned away from one of history’s most
compelling moral challenges.
FDR AND THE
1942-1945
David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945
(Pantheon Books, 1984), 311-313
CONFRONT THE ISSUE
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
HOLOCAUST
No one of us, including scholars and historians, can review the bestial crimes of Adolf Hitler and his
Nazi thugs and all those who carried out their orders to kill innocent men, women, and children,
without hanging our heads in sorrow. But we must never forget that it was the Nazis who committed
this most terrible crime led by a psychopath, Adolf Hitler….How ironic that our greatest president of
[the twentieth] century—the man Hitler hated most, the leader constantly derided by the anti-Semites,
vilified by Goebbels as a “mentally ill cripple” and as “that Jew Rosenfeld,” violently attacked by the
isolationist press—how ironic that he should be faulted for being indifferent to the genocide. For all of
us, the shadow of doubt that enough was not done will always remain, even if there was little more that
could have been done. But it is the killers who bear the responsibility for their deeds. To say that “we
are all guilty” allows the truly guilty to avoid that responsibility. We must remember for all the days of
our lives that it was Hitler who imagined the Holocaust and the Nazis who carried it out. We were not
their accomplices. We destroyed them. Winston Churchill once said that Franklin Roosevelt was the
greatest man he had ever known. President Roosevelt’s life, he said, “must be regarded as one of the
commanding events of human destiny.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt, more than any other American, is
entitled to the historical credit for mobilizing and leading the forces that destroyed the Nazi barbarians
and so saved western civilization.
FDR AND THE
1942-1945
William J. vanden Heuvel, “America and the Holocaust,” American Heritage Magazine, July/August 1999
CONFRONT THE ISSUE
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
HOLOCAUST
With almost sixty years of hindsight, Roosevelt’s silence seems a strange lapse in the record of a
President who normally spoke to Americans on grave world issues with courage, candor and foresight.
That lapse is underscored by Roosevelt’s lateness in pushing his officials to save Jewish refugees and
his reluctance to seriously entertain whether bombing Auschwitz might save some of Hitler’s intended
victims without postponing victory in Europe. Roosevelt’s tendency to shunt Hitler’s war against the
Jews to a separate compartment of his mind compromised his planning for postwar Germany. Today,
any scholar trying to explain why Hitlerite Germany was uniquely evil would naturally start with Hitler’s
zeal, shared by many Germans, to murder an entire people. Instead, when Roosevelt privately spoke of
the problem with Germany, he indulged in silly rants about Prussians, military uniforms and marching
and did not mention genocide at all—even though he had privately learned more about the Holocaust
than most Americans of the time. No one should expect a President to understand such a problem
with the sophistication of a scholar who has twenty-twenty hindsight. But Roosevelt’s failure to note the
biggest thing wrong with Hitler’s Germany had serious consequences.
FDR AND THE
1942-1945
Michael Beschloss, The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1941-1945
(Simon & Schuster, 2002) 284-285
CONFRONT THE ISSUE
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
HOLOCAUST
The War Refugee Board represented a small gesture of atonement by a nation whose apathy and
inaction were exploited by Adolf Hitler. As he moved systematically toward the total destruction of
the Jews, the government and the people of the United States remained bystanders. Oblivious to the
evidence which poured from official and unofficial sources, Americans went about their business
unmoved and unconcerned. Those who tried to awaken the nation were dismissed as alarmists, cranks
or Zionists. Many Jews were as disinterested as their Christian countrymen. The bystanders to cruelty
became bystanders to genocide. The holocaust has ended. The six million lie in nameless graves. But
what of the future? Is genocide now unthinkable, or are the potential victims somewhere in the world
going about their business, devoted to their children, aspiring to a better life, unaware of a gathering
threat? Who are the potential victims? Who the bystanders?
FDR AND THE
1942-1945
Arthur D. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (Random House, 1968), 383-384